Greetings…
Beginning in August, on one Sunday each month, I will be welcoming you into a conversation I have been hosting within myself for most of my life. Part philosophical exercise, part spiritual quest: my inner conversation has sought to discover bedrock virtues for living wisely in unwise times.
Doing so while the world is mired in a climate of rampant cynicism, societal despair, never-ceasing new data and breaking news click bait; the journey has, at times, been a slog. Wrong paths have been taken. As I have come to learn, backtracking happens when wisdom is the destination. Happily when that backtracking has been necessary, there are these ancient voices, paths, points of view pointing a way forward through all the inner and outer chaos.
What I will share with you on Sunday mornings is a snapshot of my meander through influential faith and philosophical traditions; which often overlap, revealing helpful, wise common threads. These threads – when braided together – have the potential to point us along a wise, universal way that serves both humanity’s and our ecological co-inhabitants’ flourishing.
As we move along, I welcome your insights and resonances and challenges. Please email, text or meet me for a cup of coffee that we might come to a shared understanding. I ask this especially when/if I may have misinterpreted or misrepresented a spiritual path that is personal to you. As I shared in the first paragraph, I wholeheartedly imagine our time together to be a conversation in the service of wisdom.
The Plan:
When appropriate, I will provide a glossary of terms for Sunday messages. For example in the next paragraph, I mention the “Axial Age”, which may not be common knowledge. This term and others will be explained for the purpose of shared understanding. Prior to our first gathering, I will send a quick primer on the distinction between wisdom, knowledge, and information. The relationship between these three ways of “knowing/perceiving” experience is what prompted me to contemplate how to recover a wise way for the living of these days.
Our conversation begins with what the religious scholar, Huston Smith, calls primal religion. What you and I might call indigenous, nature-based, tribal pre-Axial age traditions, primal religious experience provides the spiritual compost for every world religion and philosophical school of thought. I imagine primal religious experience to provide much bedrock material for wisdom’s ways.
From primal religions, we will consider two spiritual, indigenous evolutions: Vedism and Celtic spirituality.
On our third gathering, we will take a gander at the Classical Greek Wisdom traditions: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Cynics, and the Stoics. (This may take two sessions.)
Turning to the Judeo-Christian tradition, wisdom plays a vital, though often sublimated, role in the narratives’ teachings. Wisdom, by the way, is associated with the divine feminine in both the Hebrew and Christian texts.
Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism: Vedism’s religious offspring deliver significant instruction as to the Way of Wisdom.
Imprinting a wiser Way: finding and commending common threads in the service of wisdom.
So, there you go. A sprint through our cultural wisdom traditions! I look forward to the adventure! Hold on tight! 🙂
Ever on the way, Charis
DEFINITIONS
Some definitions in the service of a shared, wise conversation.
WISDOM: What does it mean to be wise person in unwise times? This is our search, our quandary over next several months. I invite you to write down in the space below your definition of wisdom. We will see how your definition conforms with the wisdom of the ages when we arrive at our final gathering a few months from now.
RELIGION: Originating from the Latin, religion combines two Latinate terms. When the prefix “re”, which means again, and “ligio”, which means to bind or to come together (like ligament), are combined, the term religion simply means to bind, connect, bring together individuals, mindsets, communities in a common cause or point of view or aspiration. Because of the prefix “re”, there is the suggestion that – in our case – human beings break apart, only to be re-bound by way of a common concern, rituals, passions, meeting grounds, etc. Please note: there is no necessary connection between religion and a transcendent realm. As such, for some, football (soccer or the NFL) can function as a religious experience.
Week 1: Origins: Primal Spirituality August 10th
Primal spirituality: What some may call indigenous spirituality, these ancient spiritual paths tend to be tribal; nomadic, non-rational; non-doctrinal; dependent on orality versus literacy; origin (past) versus future oriented; symbol oriented; host a circular versus chronological perception of time and causality; generally unconcerned about what comes “next”, including after death. Every philosophic and religious systems has roots in primal spirituality.
Primal spirituality was the primary sacred/human means of discerning meaning, connection, safety, wisdom until the Axial Age (around 350 BCE). Due to geography and human migration patterns, indigenous religions in South, Meso, North America, parts of Africa, Australia and the Far East maintained primal religious sensibilities after the Axial Age.
Axial Age: The Axial Age is the period when the great intellectual, philosophical, and religious systems emerged. Shaping subsequent human society and culture, it was during the Axial Age that Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, the Hebrew Prophets, Confucianism, Daoism, Plato and Aristotle emerged. Occurring during the 1st millennium BCE, “The Axial “Age” ranges from 800 BCE to 200 BCE, covering the time when significant figures like Zarathustra (who may have lived slightly before or even five millennia before the Axial Age), the Buddha, Confucius, and Socrates lived.
The phrase originated with the German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, who noted how during this period there was a shift—or a turn, as if on an axis—away from predominantly localized concerns (primal religious concerns) towards transcendence. “Transcendence” means “to go beyond.”
In the case of the Axial “revolution”, “going beyond” bears several meanings. Among them are a shift to thinking about the cosmos and the way it works rather than taking for granted that it works; the rise of second-order thinking about the ways that human beings even think about the universe in the first place and come to know it, a turning away from propitiating tribal or civic deities (characterized as “feeding the gods”) and turning toward speculation about the fate of humanity; formulating prescriptions about human beings’ relationship with the cosmos, about “The Good”, and how human beings can be or should be “good.” In short, a philosophical inclination arises during this period. In contrast to primal religions, the Axial Age marks a turn toward formalizing points of view, writing down rather than transmitting orally their rituals and wisdom. In most cases, the representative “thinkers” of each of these traditions postulated solutions to life’s questions and problems not only for themselves and their respective cultures but for also humankind as a whole. As local and tradition-specific as their investigations may have begun, their concerns were global, even universal.